The Video Games Job Market
With having achieved my bachelor’s degree less than a year ago, knowing people from my same class who did the same, having a girlfriend who will do so in a few months, and always wanting to know what game development opportunities are out there, I feel like I’ve gotten a decent pulse of the video game job market. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, so this felt like a good spot to put my thoughts on it. From what I’ve read, heard, and seen, the games industry shares a lot of the same job market trends as the tech industry in general, so some of my thoughts will likely apply there as well. Here they are:
The Experience Catch 22
This has to be the biggest source of frustration for me when looking at jobs in the video game industry. This is definitely one that I’ve seen apply to tech as a whole. It’s just a job market problem in general that (if I were to guess) stems from an abundance of hirable candidates and not enough jobs to give out to them.
Let’s paint a picture. You’ve studied for years to understand games, love games as an art form, and acquire the necessary skills to get involved in building these great games. And when I say you have the “necessary skills,” I mean you meet the qualifications. You even exceed the qualifications. You have the $100,000 piece of paper to show that you qualify academically, you have the portfolio and personal projects to show that you qualify creatively, you have the resume to show that you qualify technically, and you have the cover letter to show that you qualify passionately. Perfect! Now all that’s left is to actually find the job. The hard part is over. You spent half a decade or longer bolstering your abilities, and now it may just take you an extra few months to land that job in the industry you’ve been itching to get into.
Except wait a minute. You’re dead on arrival because job posting after job posting lists an entry/junior/associate-level position that requires at least five years of professional game development experience as well as at least one shipped AAA game in order to qualify. Maybe you’re lucky enough to find a position that only requires two years of experience in game development with no expectation of a huge, shipped title.
Okay. Well, that’s a simple enough fix. All you have to do is get a little more professional experience at a small studio that doesn’t pay you anything, requires 30 hours of work a week, and do that for only two years. Problem solved.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me fear for the video game industry at times. Thankfully, it’s not going anywhere because people love games. However, the psychotic expectations of job listing writers for entry-level candidates to have multiple years of professional experience and shipped titles has to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of in my entire life. Do people not know what words mean anymore? Do we need a certificate course that all managers and HR reps are required to take with the sole purpose of the curriculum being the definition of the term “entry-level”? It’s not that hard.
If it’s a mid-level position, just post it as a mid-level position. The audacity to minimalize your diamond-in-the-rough, mid-level, highly sophisticated candidates by sticking them in a lower-paying, lower-title job unbefitting of their station is disgusting. Organizations should not be allowed to get away with pretending their cream-of-the-crop talents are dime-a-dozen hacks.
The bottom line: this practice is disrespectful to the people who have worked extremely hard to get into an industry that they love and downright insulting to the people who have worked even harder to also accumulate vast experience just to take a job that they are well overqualified for.
The AAA Farse
I touched on this in the previous one, but there is a huge push for candidates who have shipped a AAA title. I see this all the time in job postings from every level of studio. The funniest thing about this to me is the idea that these people who have worked on AAA titles are thought of as so far superior and incredible that there would be a hard cutoff to anyone who hasn’t done that. Are video game companies really that excited to see that you worked on and shipped Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, or Concord, or Multiversus, or Madden NFL 25, or Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, or Skull and Bones, or Anthem, or Battlefield 2042, or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, or Fallout 76?
I could go on for pages just listing games. These were all considered AAA titles. Between them, the average Metacritic score across all platforms is 61.31. That’s on Metacritic; the game review aggregator where a score of 70 is considered a failure. My question is: should these games really be the barometer for which people in the industry can make quality games?
I want to make it clear that my intention is not to belittle the developers who poured a lot of heart and soul into these games. What I’m saying is that just like anyone who works on a AAA title is capable of producing a bad game, anybody who hasn’t is capable of producing a good game. While I can understand AAA studios wanting AAA experience for some of their higher-level roles for the sake of knowing that a candidate can work successfully on a large team with many moving parts, I don’t see how having that experience qualifies anyone for a job that’s mid-level or below.
Part of this conversation is the question of what AAA even means anymore. I think I’ll do a whole post on that sometime in the near future.
Job? What Jobs?
This one is much more common for mid-sized studios. In the 2,025th year (give or take) following the birth of Jesus, an era in which I can have three jobs and still maintain this website with extreme ease through Square Space, there is no excuse to not have a careers/jobs page.
My guess is that these mid-sized developers grew from smaller studios that originally didn’t have a lot of eyes from fans or the media, so they didn’t receive a lot of inquiries for job opportunities. Furthermore, if they did, they didn’t have an extra job to hand out. However, after you’ve released enough games, gathered enough attention, or grown to a particular size, it’s time to make sure people on your website have a place to go for job inquiries. There are tons of studios out there with job pages that simply say, “We don’t have any positions right now.“ There’s nothing wrong with that.
What is wrong is leaving people with no information and then ghosting your potential candidates when they contact you via your contact page. If you had a job page that just said there were no positions available, I wouldn’t have a problem with being ghosted. Either it’s my fault for not looking at the job page, or I’m prepared to not hear back because I’ve already seen that no jobs are posted.
Where I live, there aren’t a ton of video game companies, and most of the ones here aren’t in a position to hire anyone. However, there’s a decently sized one that has worked on a lot of big IPs and grown to what I would consider a mid-level studio. They have no page on their website for jobs, and their contact page is a joke. It gives no direction on what communications they’re expecting for the contact page, and the input field for your message is only one line. You cannot create new lines even if you try. In fact, if you try to create a new line with the “Enter” or “Return” key, the form gets submitted. There’s also no place to attach a resume, no email address to send a resume outside of the contact page, and no subject line.
Was I surprised when I never heard back from that company? Nope. Because that’s the kind of care you expect from a company that doesn’t even create a proper website. I imagine my message fell into a junk email abyss, never to be seen by whoever is in charge of checking that email account. It’s entirely possible nobody is in charge of checking it at all.
Ultimately, if as a company you don’t have directions for people coming to your site looking for jobs, you’re doing everybody—including yourself and your employees—a disservice. And furthermore, if you insist on leaving that advice unheeded, then have the courtesy to respond to people’s messages when you receive emails from your contact form wondering about job opportunities.
Part-Time Is Smart-Time
If you spent roughly a year looking at video game job postings like I did, you’ll come to find that part-time jobs are sometimes the best opportunities. They’re great ways to get into the industry with very little on-the-job experience. Standards are much lower for these positions because they’re often coming from studios that can’t afford to hire a full-time employee. There are some projects you can become a part of that will only require 5-10 hours a week. While that’s still a lot, it’s still not the requirements for most part-time jobs that typically ask 20-25 hours (sometimes up to 30 hours) per week.
The biggest downfall of part-time work in the video game industry is that a lot of it is unpaid. Instead of money being the compensation, the compensation is the networking, the added experience to your skillset, the added experience to your resume/portfolio, and scratching that itch to make something. If you have the time to commit to such a position, there should be no hesitation to at least apply.
No Remote Jobs in the U.S.
I have seen hundreds of remote jobs that I qualify for over the past year or so… unfortunately, they’re all remote jobs for people in other countries. If you’re trying to work in video game development in the United States, you pretty much have to be physically located in one of 6 states: California, North Carolina, Washington, Massachusetts, Texas, or Florida.
Why these states? Because those are where a lot of large game companies are headquartered. In California, you have an unending number of companies with presences. For the purposes of brevity, I’ll just list PlayStation and Riot Games as examples. In North Carolina, you have Epic Games which has a huge workforce. Washington is home of Xbox headquarters and Nintendo of America. Massachusetts has branches of Rockstar and CD Projekt RED. Texas boasts Gearbox and Id Software, as well as branches of Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts is also probably the largest developer and publisher in Florida in addition to the presence of Iron Galaxy. While there are some large companies leading the charge for remote work, such as Insomniac, very few positions in the industry embrace work-from-home as a way to reach broader talent pools.
There are tons of game development studios in all reaches of the United States, but when it comes to volume of jobs, these are the places to be, and there’s no competition.
Sometimes, I Wish I Lived In Canada
No, that’s not because of the current political landscape in the United States. I’ve seen so many game development opportunities in Canada, and it makes me sad sometimes that I feel so rooted in the U.S. I constantly see positions I’d like to apply for, but they turn out to be in north of the boarder. Lots of large developers have a presence there, including most of the ones I named in the previous point. It’s difficult knowing how close Canada is yet how unable I am to reach the job opportunities there.
The job market is really tough right now for a lot of people, and my ranting on my blog about it while having a stable, full-time job as well as two other part-time jobs is a far cry from the struggles other people go through on a daily basis trying to find work. However, even with the small glimpses I’ve gotten, it’s been rough to see and hard to endure. There are analysts hypothesizing that 2025 and 2026 collectively are going to be big rebound years for the video games industry, and that typically means more jobs. I just hope they’re right and that companies start to think smaller with their games in order to stay afloat longer.